2009 in Review, a Blogging Perspective.

Outside, the snow is gently falling as I think back over 2009. A lot has gone on this year, but for a moment, let me look at it strictly from the perspective of this blog. This is the 523 entry I will post in my blog this year. I have written over 280,000 words on my blog on a wide variety of topics.

The most popular blog posts I wrote during 2009 in terms of the number of times they were read were about technology, and technology posts took up the majority of my top ten blogposts. Graphviz and Matlab were the top technology topics.

In terms of what I wrote, I wrote most often on politics, Connecticut news, technology, the future of media and social networks. I have been trying to make better use of categories and encouraging people to read or subscribe to those categories that are most in their interest.

According to Google Analytics, I have had over 70,000 unique visitors this year, visiting over 107,000 times, and viewing over 141,000 pages. The majority use Firefox and stay on the site for around a minute. People have visited from 167 different countries. The United States accounts for the most visitors, followed by the Philippines, Canada, the United Kingdom, Malaysia, Netherlands, India, Singapore, Indonesia, and Germany. Within the United States, Connecticut accounts for the most visitors, followed by California, New York, Texas, and Pennsylvania.

Sites like EntreCard, Adgitize, Blogexplosion and CMF ads have brought a lot of visitors. Other social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Disqus and TableTalk were also important.

In terms of topics that people have searched on, Graphviz was the most popular, followed by ’25 things about me’, ‘Smoking Jacket’, ‘Colgate Smile Second Life’, and the ‘Woodbridge Country Club’ were all popular searches. Another important set of popular searches have been names of people that I’ve written about including Kenneth Ireland, Sergey Aleynikov, Colin Mcenroe, Jim Amann, and Richard Roszkowski.

So, that’s a brief view of my blog for 2009. With all of this in mind, I’ll start preparing for 2010. How about you? How was your year? Do you blog? How did your blog do? What topics were popular and which weren’t? Share your ideas and let’s look forward to a great 2010.